28.02.2017

At the same time it is possible to read Joey the mechanical boy as a matter of (a particular course) as “exactly what you would expect” from late industrial capitalism. Not only because, as Canguilhem and Deleule argue, the machinic and the human are historically inseparable because “machines can be considered as organs of the human species (Canguilhem, 55) but because “what else” could a flow of signs that include Taylorism, Popular Mechanics, Turing machines, the space program, WW2, nuclear weapons, and “stream-lined” kitchens, produce but ...

+++ You have been disconnected. Do you wish to reconnect? <Julu> perfect love is always interruption. <Alan> cut my nipples from my breasts: plant them. @cut @plant @grow Soldiers of the Golden Fleece <Julu> and they have black bellies of black bombers cut into straight and rigid angles and just so reflecting radar everywhere across your body’s violent hills. @havoc - @#$@^&$)(%$(*&#$%& [noise is on the line] +++ You have been disconnected. Do you wish to reconnect? @love ===== (so much for nostalgia or plotting the poem in advance)

beep. beep. probable passage of clarity maintainted [sic] by subliminal direction of message through cortical centres. verbal wipeout! verbal wipeout! internal criticism of structure to maintain balance will now be established. all readers will fashion seatbelts and fasten. FASCINATION! FASCIST NATIONS! predicated police control of sentence structure to conceal emotion, justifiable paranoia in face of anti-matter actions towards ... WIPEOUT! WIPEOUT! wondering where the surplus would come from, wondering what the surplus was, the theory of note blacking and line worrying was celebrating a thousand years of bursting, it was already there as something else from someplace else,

always,

the only laws I don’t dismiss: love your neighbor, puff puff pass. And dand. “Hi again,” he wrote. “Perhaps I did not describe my question clearly: Have you used this starter before? I wanted to ask about the taste of the resulting bread.” And h dand. Bumpted. Peat in the sky — viper’s crisp. Which takes us to a central question about Iron Moon. Is this poetry that happens to be about migrant labor or a manifesto about migrant labor that happens to take the form of poetry? This is, of course, a schematic way of putting things, for the argument’s sake. And reading the book — and watching the film, to which we will turn below — will hardly move anyone to simply tick one of the boxes. To be sure, Qin’s introduction and Goodman’s afterword are more about migrant labor than about poetry. But why shouldn’t a poetry anthology be socio-politically motivated, and why shouldn’t its makers say that it is? There is, for instance, Xie Xiangnan “Work Accident Joint Investigative Report” — a kind of found poetry, almost a ready-made — on a factory worker whose finger is severed by a die-cutting machine. Her name, work number, and other details are duly supplied. And Xu Lizhi’s

I swallowed an iron moon they called it a screw I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms bent over machines, our youth died young

So what are pyroglyphs? Flames, sparks, combustions, scorch marks, the many-hued glow of fevered metals ... a vise crushing a timber, a stack of books ... a voice we thought we’d never forget ... In PYROGLYPHS, fifteen (or eighteen) monitors (at first I read “monsters”) are arranged in a circle on the floor facing up and inward at a 30-degree angle ... Poor thing, one says, did you see the fear in her at 4:54? But that is a different video. In this video, the famous Egyptian bellydancer Fifi Abdo dances up against the camera, on a table, the long room of revelers and revelers’ limbs behind her. Their arms looks like snakes. Fifi Abdo rolls around on what seems to be a blue table. A child rises from the carpeted floor. She reaches into the air, then hugs her own body, then bends her arms above her head. Behind her is the screen of a television which shows nothing but the color blue. Also behind this child is an empty pink doll buggy. A stout, faceless figure in a gray bathrobe quickly moves past the open door. Another dancer is bending at the waist: she is hopping and flapping again, her arms extended like wings. Sort of. If they are wings, they are the wings of a flightless bird. On the television screen a photo floats, then diminishes: the photo on the television is of an empty apartment’s interior (this apartment), then a woman (this dancer), pointing a finger or crossing her arms. There’s a man ... He wears a thick gold necklace. Like all photos on this television, he disappears. On the shelves are cans of vegetables. On the shelves are small plastic cups filled with fruit. Thus, for example, the image accompanying plate 10 of America (a devilish youth rising in flames from the bottom of the page) seems to fit much more closely with the speech in plate 6 (“The terror answerd: I am Orc”) than with the text that appears in plate 10 itself (“Thus wept the Angel’s voice”) — which actually seems a much closer fit with the image in plate 6. Which is to say that it turns out, with enough McDonald’s sausage patties, your ass become a piñata full of flaming snakes. From here Araki travels by train to Ginza, and after a few photographs, he is on back on the subway headed northeast to Kita-Senju, where his wife, Yoko Araki, was born and raised. On foot he cuts south to nearby Minami-Senju, then goes little further down a street which takes him into his own neighborhood of Minowa in east Tokyo. Following a quick lunch — he snaps a couple finishing up their soba, the man looking off to the side — he waits again on another station platform and catches another train — this time to the neighborhood of Kagurazaka, where his small office and darkroom were located at the time. After a few photos along the shop-lined hill for which the area is named, he heads to the next location. While all of the other transitions in the book are illustrated with literal images of transportation, a pair of butterflies floating above act as the jump into the next section: Tokyo’s vibrant Shinjuku district. Shinjuku is a hub of commuters, shopping, and nightlife. Araki would explore Shinjuku nights a decade later with Tokyo Lucky Hole. In the backgrounds we find references to other coordinates from Araki’s world: Kinokuniya Bookstore, for example, where Sentimental Journey was first put on the shelves, a sign for DUG, his favorite jazz bar. The final quarter of the book takes the viewer to a cheap theme park in Asakusa, and afterward to an all-girl revue with short-skirted cancan girls. Finally, leaving the theater, Araki is back on the streets, then onto another subway platform, and finally back on the train headed home. If at first glance the pictures appear to lack the action or form typically idealized in street photography, viewers who look a little harder will be rewarded with captivating details. Within a single frame it’s easy to spot several things that would have excited Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, but Araki was doing something else: working with the feeling of the city instead of recording its characters. Making a plain picture is easy; making a memorable one with a Winogrand “punch” a bit harder, but taking the Atget route is perhaps the most difficult of all ... Or not. Imagine that you died, your entrails are yanked out and bathed. Then you are ground up and stuffed into those intestines. I’m not a vegetarian but it’s useful to think this way to understand the atmosphere of the Baroque. And fittingly, the same night we were looking at Nathalie Djurberg’s work, we also came upon a video of large brown turds, inflatable ones by Paul McCarthy swaying in a public park in Utrecht. The raid yielded no significant intelligence, US officials told NBC News on Monday. Earlier this month, however, Pentagon officials said it produced “actionable intelligence.” So, too, did White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who initially called the raid “highly successful.” OK. Call me Ishmael. Sing the whole of the song that includes the line, “All that could not sink or swim was just left there to float.”

That is the way things happen; for ever and ever Plum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers And the hard bright light composes A meaningless moment into an eternal fact Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile ...

to _dance_ the archive /\ archive the dance: subaltern forms shifting screens a / \ a consequence of broken frames it is at the inter- / \-secting of the two: the lozenge it is at the inter- \ /-secting of the two: the lozenge shifting screens a \ / a consequence of broken frames to _dance_ the archive \/ archive the dance: subaltern forms

Then the gods gather in great whirlwinds. They gather at the boundary and look across. They see whatever may be absent but it is beyond their reach; they have no arms and legs and their voices do not carry them farther. Vast cataclysms of orange energy sweep from their hungry faces. They speak unknown languages and even I do not know their languages. I did not know nor ask why they are gods. Now there are questions framed by the whirlwind and the boundary. The sky here has no energy. Or rather is all energy, parceled by lines determined by a metric space. It is spectral blue. Sometimes at night arms and legs of kami push out through my skin, distort me. Painful partial births; in the morning I look and see nothing ... But language, that is Western culture, was more than some recumbent artifact to be used or not as the intelligentsia saw fit. Its place in their lives had been established long before they found the means of mastering it. Indeed, they were themselves in part defined by those languages of rule and commerce. In Frantz Fanon’s poetic description, they were Black skins under white masks. CLR James has quite effectively captured this contradiction: Césaire and I were talking one day, and I asked him: “Where do you come from?” He said, “Well I grew up in Martinique [and went to] the Victor Schoelscher school.” So I said: “What did you do there?” He told me: “Latin and Greek and French literature.” And I said: “What next?” He said, “I went to France, and I went to the Ecole Normale Superieure.” I said, “Yes I know that school. It is famous for producing scholars and Communists.” (Césaire was one of the first in each department: he was one of the finest scholars and he was a notable Communist.) And I said: “What did you do there?” And he said: “Latin and Greek and French literature.” And then I said: “Where did you go from there?” And he said: “I went to the Sorbonne.” And I said, “I suppose you did there Latin and Greek and French Literature?” And he said: “Exactly.” He said, “But there is one thing more.” And I asked: “What is that?” He said, “I went back to teach in Martinique, and I went to the Victor Schoelscher school, and there I taught Latin and Greek and French literature.” So when Césaire wrote his tremendous attack upon Western civilization, In Return to My Native Land, and said that Négritude was a statement for some concepts of civilization which the Black people had and which would be important in any development of civilization away from capitalist society, he was able to make this ferocious attack upon Western civilization because he knew it inside out ... He had spent some twenty years studying it.

26.02.2017

Anyway, all I say I personalal — personalalal — personalal — personal posi — posi — because we get to go down, walk down to the corner, we can buy — We can buy a — a — a penny candy bar for twentyfive dollars, and — and we can — we can have — we can — you just walk down to the corner and get an orange. You guys have to pick em. We just walk down to the corner, buy us an orange for twenty-five cents, plus tax, twentyfive dollars, and we get — (Laughter) And we’re even able — I think — I think — I think — like we have more material possessions, like we can walk down to the store, we can buy a new pair of shoes and — and (blows raspberry) on your capitalism and all your goddamn money. You know what — I have — I have — (Pause) I think that you’re — you’re — you’re — you’re going down to the middle of the store, it’s stupid, cause you have to waste all your money that you worked for, just to buy a stupid piece of yucky candy. It ain’t good for you anyway. But here, we can — get — just make candy — Um — Um — (clears throat) In capitalism, uh — you — you say, and our chocolate and stuff is junk, but our chocolate — and uh, and — and all the — and — and — and we have — we had — we even have signs up and — and — and stuff that even say that we help save um, you know on those cigarette packages, they even say uh, don’t smoke, and — because it gives you cancer, that’s how concerned we are about our people, and we have warehouse and warehouses full of bombs that can blow up the whole world three times over and over again, so I think we’re — we’re more — we like — we’re — and — and we — we — No, no, no — Yeah, and — and — and your whole system — I think — See, you guy say that we get — those — those — I have — I have my — I have my own bodyguards. Well, you have your own bodyguards, but in socialism, we ain’t got to have bodyguards. We can — We can go pick off the trees of our own land. We don’t have to buy like twenty-five dollars, and things like that. And you can walk down the street with tailored suits and everything, but in socialism, everybody —Right on, brother, right on, right — Okay, yeah, but “twigs are inside / us” — Rub your fingers on the TV with the sound off — right on — it should lead

to an augmentation in the number of receptor sites and an expansion of the postsynaptic receptor region, through conversion of receptor monomers into receptor polymers and perhaps some increase in the synthesis of monomers. [None of these ideas bears upon the chemical basis for depolarization induced by acquisition of transmitter by receptor. There is evidence

Along the corridor of near frequency I saw willing and discrete the season not yet for sorrow advanced, nearby not yet even so inference to claim, etc

for arguably, the “I” of the poem sees is no longer “a fair field full of folk” but an infinite series of force fields whose patterns and elements follow models of chaos and complexity rather than any principle of linearity or noncontradiction ... so a man walks into a bar, OK, in Olathe, Kansas, where a bunch of people are watching a basketball game, yells “Get out of my country!”, then opens fire. Pretty funny so far, right? But it gets better. Two of the three guys he shoots are engineers from India, but he thinks they’re from quote unquote his words the Middle East. It gets even funnier than that tho. How do I know he thinks they’re from the Middle East? Because he drives to an Applebee’s about 80 miles away, in Missouri, tells some people there he shot some Middle Easterners, and asks for a place to hide. For sanctuary. Like Applebee’s, APPLEBEE’S, is a church or something. Should I wait a minute til you catch your breath? OK. Shit, I forgot the real punchline: one of the shot men dies. OK. What? Yeah, I do have contempt for the Trump people. Hatred, really. What? No, no, no. Don’t confuse me with a Democrat. If it weren’t for Republicans, Democrats would be USAmerica’s lowest form of life. And don’t confuse me with a Libertarian or a Green, either ... OK. We are not supposed to talk aloud, or sing. Why did I say we? Iam not allowed to sing. Or rather, requested not to. Do theywatch us, no, me? With infra­red or whatever they have. They’re advanced enough in those ways. Must be something. Or how do they know when to bring in the food? Knock me out with odourless gas? No. That’s what the man over the road used to say to his dog. Die for your country! And over on his back he’d go. Caesar was the dog’s name, I just remembered. Not Tray. That’s what I thought it should be. And wherever I went, went my po-or dog Tray. Did I say dog? Back then, I had had an inchoate hope of sitting in Council with Elephants, though I had no idea what that might possibly mean. Turns out that it’s in a book about love that ends when the boy with too many donuts saves the old woman in the cellar from drowning in bad coffee. Her forehead is folded, gray and black, her nose long enough she can’t see the red dot in front of her. The word “hackles” comes to mind. Each morning the man prays to (and for) a six-foot cardboard image of the president. And we all fall down. We run toward it like mourners behind a wagon led by a camel, ending up in a rutted field beside a plain casket. These stops have been edited for narrative effect. The elephant sniffs my hands at the keyboard, my toes, the bed spread. Something always smells. Ask for the alternative happy meal. Customers who viewed this item also viewed: Wigs for your do;, Gandhi Face-Ka-Bobs, tw, live adult hissing cockroaches; and Reverse Vaginal Tightening Gel for Women. A 14th-century stone figure; broken ceramic fragments’ a Greek potter, fried eggs — “volcanoes”; thin sheet zinc and brass, etched and chased, knotted and shaped — Leave your review on Trip Advisor. One day, when the sea delivered up a fish of strange colours and dimensions, she knew the world. And so it proved. Which is to say that in a somer seson, whan softe was the Sonne, I awoke from a dream in which I was working in a medieval petrol station. Such dreams! Interests rates are rising like a boner on a Greek vase. And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city, from which all possible cities can be deduced. In all possible cities the grass is blue. It was an intricately carved piece of cream-coloured limestone with a small piece of smooth orange limestone that I managed to fit inside it. Maybe we can go vegan as a compromise. I read the motorcycle driver’s handbook while I’m at it, just in case. Because I wanted to be a drag queen. Because I wanted to be in early cinema. Everything is grey: slow descent into a warm and acrid cell nucleus, memory wearing off through scattered images whose logic is as atomized as the territories I go through. The method, because it takes the form of a diary whose structure is premeditated in order to challenge its own rules, ends up depending on resurgences that alter the physical space of the exclusion zone. I am being led by my own moves from fear into stillness, knowing every gesture traces an impossible path to be followed nonetheless. Abandoned houses face the sea and the wind in the contaminated landscape. Being there, breathing cold air, memories of an outside world slowly dissolved into the crisp reality of ... Ghosts are like vanished gods of an extinct world. Each structure is like a dark omen, a sign of disasters to come. The underlying principle is the broken desire of those who flee as far as strength allows. While the dead know in their flesh how far hell extends. Which is why, in his introduction to Will Alexander’s Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, Andrew Joron writes that Alexander’s work is “Universal History as an instantaneous burst of information ... a Signal composed of the sum total of all signals.”

In this fire of fluidic jeopardy

diamonds uncoil

& reconstruct & re-condense

like adjudicated burins

or telepathic moon forms

like psychic drafts & diacritics

being pressured by conundrum & purity

compressed below the level of the gaunt reflecting metals

diamonds

crushed & glinting pions

incessant suns in the pedalfer vapours

where the Sun quakes by quanta

by powerful interior fractals

So yes, it may be that Elephants, who are probably more intelligent than we are, can, through their empathic capacity, read the heart across vast distances, unimpeded by species barriers, and send out subliminal communications which I / we receive and respond to by coming to meet them. What does it mean? How and why are they communicating with us? What do they want? How can we meet their call?

Did we meet the Elephant people? We did. Did we apologize? We did. For what? For everything. Were we immersed in the herd? We were. Was there communication? Yes. Was there Epiphany? I don’t really know.

I mean, I don’t remember exactly but it would be something like this: in one room, there would be a giant waxen horn with a silent video showing in one end, in the next, the horn funneling toward a telephone and human actor / model (sometimes Hamilton would sit in herself) sitting motionless at a table with hands pressed downward and a coat trailing into the next, in which there might have been a floor made from old typeface packed in upwards so that when anyone entered they were literally walking on text and having that text stamped on the soles of their shoes. In short, Trout Mask Replica became less important to me over the years than did Safe as Milk. So yes, on the fourth day of my sickness I lay in bed increasingly concerned a memory I couldn’t shake: a village at twilight, uninhabited houses, several animals burning. It put me in mind of the mass incineration of farm animals during the foot and mouth outbreak that took place in Britain in 2001. You remember that? When they burnt all the animals. I remember seeing the images on TV, and saying to everyone who’d listen that Britain was in serious danger of putting a hex on itself. Obviously I was right. But it wasn’t that was bothering me. As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another. In such a radically expanded universe some of the most basic insights offered by today’s astronomy will be unavailable. For instance, he points out that, “you can’t measure the redshift of galaxies if you can’t see galaxies. And if you can’t see galaxies, how do you even know that the universe is expanding?” Etc etc. But here’s my question: what if something similar has already happened — what if something we need to know has already disappeared? For example, could even the widely-accepted conclusion that there was a Big Bang be just an ironic side-effect of having lost some other form of cosmic evidence that long ago slipped eternally away from our view?

First, the yellow canary died, when its white cage fell down.

Then we found a pigeon’s head at the front door.

As for the rest of us, we learn something important about ourselves watching from the loading dock as the mushroom cloud announces the end of another season—

but please note, as Breitbart does, that it’s not disease per se that refugees bring with them, but “flesh-eating” disease ... “They’re coming to get you Barbara ... They’re coming for you, Barbara.” You would be too. He lives on the prison planet, encased in a thick concrete shield twenty miles above sea level: you think it’s night and it’s always been night, but those stars are just a fluorescent buzz, each constellation has its tangled wiring and a strange cloudy liquid that slowly drips from one corner, and you’ve confused the moon with a searchlight since the day you were born. Every now and then, or, possibly, at extremely regular intervals, the prisoners crisp in their cells, body fat dripping liquid through the fissures in their scoriated skin, because ... well, the weather-control stations, the mind rays, all arranged in some great chain of power that puffs out your head into a greasy sphere and makes you yell, or detail the Satanic imagery in cereal boxes and the patterns in nasal mucous when you blow your nose and oh my god the subliminals buried in those mid-morning TV commercials like if you’ve SUFfered an INjury that WASn’t your FAULT, come to LAWyers 4 YOU.

23.02.2017

I could hear the radio blaring “I’ll see you in the funny papers some old day, so long, my honey, so long ...” So yes, there is indeed a common, coherent and justifiable set of humanist objections to the type of concepts created by Deleuze and Guattari: it is all very well to celebrate nomadology unless you actually happen to be a stateless person; it is all very well to champion the schizo unless you have lived schizophrenia; and it is suspiciously timely to advocate becoming-woman on the way to becoming-imperceptible precisely at that moment that real women are claiming subjectivity for themselves. Which is to say that at Jebel Hafeet the coral has formed an immense natural totem. And that the pink of the rock meets its hue in the glowing tail of the receding sun. And that hundreds of creatures, a mass of butterflies, thrive around caves at the base, where a hot water spring pools out in the horizon. And that mountain felines convene around commercial food sources. As day pulls away, electricity announces its dominion, and the landscape, the distance, becomes a transitory circuit board. Do you know what Jebel Hafeet means? The Empty Mountain. So yes, and no: all faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Are we talking here about what Lawrence Gross calls, re the colonization and world-destruction of the Anishinaabeg, ‘postapocalypse stress syndrome’? What we still don’t know will maybe kill us in forever and a week, and yet and yet, my chic LA aura beam will still be lambent if we are ever here again. How quiet the night air, how mutilated the still small voice of calm. What’s more, those pulses of carbon dioxide corresponded to seismic events, as the Earth moves and gases are released. Sparkle sparkle time. On the front is a leaf from a Beatus Manuscript: “at the Clarion of the Fifth Angel's Trumpet, a Star Falls from the Sky; the Bottomless Pit is Opened with a Key; Emerging from the Smoke, Locusts Come Upon the Earth and Torment the Deathless”. Ca 1180. Spanish. Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment. And inside is “Angel Applicant” by Paul Klee. Gouache, ink, and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard.

This is not to say the war will win.

But if the frame fits, wear it.

The tire speaks of wounded roads, people who are people in roads, and sometimes.

Frank Jackson’s Mary is indeed a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. Now, however, she crosses the threshold of the odourless black and white room — after a teetotal lifetime nourished on tasteless pap. She passes gracefully into a well-lit white windowless room containing a black table. It’s quite a moment. The first thing she sees is a large Bloody Mary on the table. She picks it up and drinks it down. According to Galen Strawson, Mary’s existence until now has been painless. I don’t know why he makes this assumption. Nevertheless, we too hope that this will continue to be the case. We spare her William James’s toothache, and grant her a vision of his cloudless sky. Many have made the point. Russell made it in 1927: it is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not a part of physics. It’s a one-sentence point, or at best a one-paragraph point, a point to be made in passing, a starting datum. So of course it would not have been difficult to acquire the materials to make the suit, if the company did not already have one in the property cupboard. Bearbaiting pits often doubled as venues for early plays, and several of the public theatres were clustered around the Beargarden on Bankside; a bearskin, even if somewhat damaged, could have been acquired and recycled for stage purposes as easily as the elements of earlier romances were recycled to make the original story. It must have been a bulky item to store, all the same, and once acquired, was crying out for good uses. More bears accordingly began to appear on the Elizabethan stage. Some twenty years later, Shakespeare combined a story of a queen falsely accused of adultery with a bear that chases and, offstage, eats the guardian of her baby at the moment when he abandons it in the wilds. The bearsuit, if it was the same one, was likely in terrible shape by that time. The Winter’s Tale was its last new appearance. It is appropriate that the stage direction for its bear should be not an entrance, but ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’. So when did you start drawing? Probably when I was an infant. My parents met at the Art Institute of Chicago as students, and somewhere in there they procreated off to the side and created me. My mother’s line was always, “I met him, and I said, ‘If you’ll stretch my canvases I’ll clean your brushes.’” Going to the Art Institute was like going to church. We went there for our religious education. We sort of memorized paintings the way other kids memorized Bible verses. We had to know what was in the right quadrant. My father, by the way, was a great man. He was one of the great people. He taught me stealth drawing. We would get on the L train and he would take out his sketchbook, I would take out mine and we would find a person and ... When did you contract West Nile virus? I was a single parent at the time and I was trying to support my daughter so I was working at night and taking care of her during the day. When she was six or seven years old, I was bitten by a mosquito, and within three weeks I was completely paralyzed from the waist down and I lost the use of my right hand for some time. Have you always used storytelling in your life? When I was a child I had this severe disability, so I was the kid in the playground who wasn’t running. I had a spinal curvature, some amount of hunchback, two different lengths of leg, but I learned — and this is what’s so interesting about the world — I learned the telling horror and ghost stories would get a crowd of ten kids around me. So I was not alone. I learned how not to be alone in the playground. They would all show up for the next installment — of course I would always leave it hanging anywhere I could, so I could be assured that the next installment would be something they were looking forward to, because I didn’t want to be alone. Why draw the protagonist Karen as a werewolf? I drew her the way I saw myself, the way I felt I was. I drew her the way I wanted to be. My mother was very, very beautiful, and I saw that the beautiful women around me were often constrained not only by their beauty but by the way that being an object of male desire frequently caused violence in their lives. And it caused them — it causes them — to be constrained in these terribly sad ways ... So, and the second book really does deal with this, I didn’t ever want to be a woman. I mean, it just did not look like a good thing, nor did being a man, because they were being victimized by the same system. It didn’t give them much more latitude than they gave women, in many ways. They were being constrained to behave in these ways that weren’t authentic and didn’t allow them to realize their full personhood, either. Being a monster seemed like the absolute best solution. Who would you say influenced you? Goya, and Daumier, and then when I was about eight years old my grandmother in New Mexico began sending me the Collier’s Illustrated Dickens, and if I read one she would send me another. They were big and fat and thick and had these beautiful illustrations, beautiful engravings. I just wanted that experience: to write stories where the drawings were that articulated and atmospheric. Any contemporary cartoonists? Well, I got to meet Art Spiegelman. I sat down at a bench at the Miami Book Fair and I’m looking at this guy who’s sitting across from me. He introduces himself and says his name is Dean Haspiel and I said, “Oh, okay,” and shook his hand. I felt like people were looking at me and thinking, “Oh, a little old lady, what did she write?” I’m sure that’s what people thought. And I have crumbs on my face from the empanadas and am totally a train wreck and he says, “What did you write?” And I said, “I wrote this book,” and he looks at me, with this blinking face, like he was trying to put me together with this book. And then he turns to this guy next to him — he doesn’t even say anything to me — and he whispers to this guy, and that guy turns around and looks at me with the same expression, mouth open, blink blink, and that guy puts his hand out and says, “I’m Charlie, I work at Adams, I think you want to meet somebody.” So Charlie turns to this other guy, this guy looks like some kind of very distinguished member of the intelligentsia of Weimar Berlin. He’s vaping in this very elegant way. And Charlie says something to him, and then this weird thing happens. He just reaches across the table and grabs my hand and says, “I’m Art Spiegelman and I loved your book,” and then I started crying like a big dumb baby. It was absolutely the craziest thing. But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty youngster that was his child. True faith is not lacking to him, he has this faith; he would make the sacrifice in the right spirit if only he could believe he was the one meant. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son he would change on the way into Don Quixote. The world would have been enraged at the other Abraham could it have beheld him at the time, but this one is afraid that the world would laugh itself to death at the sight of him. However, it is not the ridiculousness as such that he is afraid of — though he is, of course, afraid of that too and, above all, of his joining in the laughter — but in the main he is afraid that this ridiculousness will make him even older and uglier, his son even dirtier, even more unworthy of being really called. An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing ... This Abraham serves as a model for what I am calling the misinterpellated subject. He is either totally unexpected or a pawn for the interplay between the powerful and the desired; he is a bystander at best, an unwanted intruder at worst. My interest in this parable lies not so much in the intention of the caller, however — that is, in terms of whom God meant to call — and much more with what happens to this subject when she or he actually shows up. What does this subject do at this point (after what must be a highly awkward pause)? Does he also attempt to sacrifice his son? Would God show him the same mercy that was shown to the intended Abraham? Most critically, what happens if — no, when — all the hope and faith this Abraham experiences when he hears the call conflict with his discovery that he was never the subject of the call in the first place? Well, my mother has a tendency to dream out loud. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom her third eye opens onto a new world, a beautiful light-filled place as peaceful as her state of mind. But her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, dealers, social workers, the rusty tapwater, roaches and rodents, the piss-scented hallways, and the piles of garbage were constant reminders that our world began and ended in a battered apartment on 157th and Amsterdam. Yet she would not allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who had inherited this earth. We were expected to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time. We were expected to stand apart from the crowd and befriend them, the misfits, the kids who stuttered, smelled bad, or had holes in their clothes. My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free — in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from our fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant. She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility. She wasn’t talking about a postmortem world, some kind of heaven or afterlife; and she was not speaking of reincarnation (which she believes in, by the way). She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air, organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism ... just free. She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had she connected her vision to any political ideology. The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations — that is, “nowhere” — is the classic definition of utopia. So call me utopian, now. For maybe two hours a week.

Which bringeth forth bread from the earth, etc. “A streak of lights appeared like a phosphorescent worm, etc.” The signpost is blue like in Germany. Of course, if a thing changes it still remains what it was first. Before our eyes a gas station appears. Like a hot bath. Like a bowl of chopped meat. Likewise: keep it moving! Don’t bother me [lit. don’t throw a hook around my nose]! [lit. a wallop or a toot] [lit. stuffed in dead birds] [lit. “do me a favor & don’t do me any favors !”] World without world going without end without us and with us so very far, until the untyll Very far from peace pepsi and not far from rip pimp c. The machine: the rest is history:

In this scene will be described, by means of a technique still to be established — perhaps with a photographic trick, etc. — the ‘abduction to the third heaven’ of Paul. Probably a vision of a dream: reappearance of a childhood place, with plants, birds, insects, water and with mounds of earth shaped like them: a humble realistic ‘terrestrial paradise’. Each effigy mound, burial site or pyramid he sees took many hundreds of years and many generations of people to create. The ancestors were people who loved the sky and creatures of the world so deeply that they expressed their care over time and space, using their own hands to carry baskets of clay from riverbanks to make mounds and pyramids, some white clay on one side, red on the other. With an extraordinary knowledge of geometry, this world has been shaped into the forms of frog and turtle and even the water spider in one region, all animals who dwell in two elements, land and water. The habitation of more than one realm is significant here. In other locations he sees mounds shaped as birds with smaller birds flying beneath the wings of the larger. He sees bear mound effigies which have been created not far from the mountain lion and deer. Important here is the realization that no species has gone unnoticed. Important also is the revelation that these mounds are still felt sites of living power. These places of special energy on the reveal an evolved consciousness at work in their creation, the accumulation of knowledge, spirituality and myth we do not often recollect because the history of this place has transpired as a progressive loss of such qualities. The final realization is that there are cosmic worlds on all continents that are yet to be revealed and that are perhaps best kept in secret since many of these have unfortunately been discovered as forests and other life-preserving environments have been destroyed. So sometimes I’ll bump into a chair and I’ll say “Excuse me.” I’ll go for a walk and I’ll stare at a tree, the way it’s silhouetted, and I feel such a connection to it, as though its roots grow out of my feet and its branches are my arms rising to the sky. Other times, when I’m so into the tasks I need to do, I become oblivious ... to the sky, the trees, the sea otters, the whales, and whatever is out there in the sea. I have to bring myself back, and as soon as I put my attention on a little leaf or on the way the waves are coming in ... It’s a constant struggle for me to bring myself back to connecting with things. But the connections are there, the signs I read in the environment — if a snake crosses my path when I’m walking across Lighthouse Field, it means something to me. I’ll look at that tree silhouetted by the sun, and its design says something to me, to my soul, which I then have to decipher. We get these messages ... from whatever you want to call the intelligence of the universe. It’s constantly speaking to us ... to both outer ear and inner ear. This is the spiritual dimension of “la mano zurda” ... “el mundo zurdo” ... which is to say that the third heaven is a complicated place. I think of the throne James Hampton constructed for its Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which I’ve seen. He hand-crafted many of the elements from cardboard and plastic, but added found objects from his neighborhood, such as old furniture and jelly jars, and discards like light bulbs from the federal office buildings in which he worked. Hampton selected shimmering metallic foils, purple paper (now faded to tan), so yes, there are compelling reasons to question the use of natural gas (eye eee methane), given the risks it poses to human health. Atmospheric methane is an extremely potent climate change gas, 86 times more potent than CO2 over its first 20 years. As such, it contributes to the host of threats to health known to be associated with climate change here and around the world. These include heat waves; the spread of diseases carried by insects and other vectors, such as West Nile disease, malaria, and Lyme; intense hurricanes, storms, and sea level rise; flooding; droughts; wildfires; and decreased crop yields. Methane leakage into the atmosphere is a problem whose magnitude is now being reassessed. The cumulative impact of this leakage may overwhelm the apparent advantage of burning gas instead of coal. If we pass the 2°C tipping point, much of the world’s permafrost will melt. The result: vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane will be released, accelerating even greater climate change; more parts of the world would reach unlivable temperatures. I probably should replace would with will. I probably should pick up my viola while the world burns. I can screech out some high notes, then bounce the bow behind the bridge. I can sound like a cat orchestra, like a cat

with a hard-on caught in a bear-trap

to quote an old poem. OK that was good. I’m back. For all those years I was working on an uncompletable book, which I conceived as the lost Critique treating not aesthetics but ‘gelastics’: experience not of the beautiful but of the funny. I made up a whole symbolic system, a ‘formal gelastics’ ... We cannot engage in such a study here, but a brief survey of a few jokes, from vastly different times and places, may help us to illustrate the distinctions made so far. To this end, it will help to introduce a bit of formal-gelastical notation:

Let ‘!’ signify the point in a joke at which the strained expectation finally snaps.

Let ‘⇓’, ‘=>’, and ‘⇑’ signify the direction in the hierarchy of value in which one is hurled as a result of this snapping.

Finally, let ‘∫/’ signify the superiority relation.

Let us consider the primate proto-joke with which we began. It seems it may be analysed as follows:

Edible !⇓ inedible chimpanzee-∫ /trainer.

Thus, with respect to its formal structure, the chimpanzee's gesture counts as a joke because it contrasts two incongruous categories, sending us plummeting downward from the relatively lofty category of ‘food’ into the lowly category of useless, inedible stones. The superiority at work in the joke occurs at a different level, as a relation between the primatologist and the primate. Often, the plunge downward is less clear, as in this classic Soviet ‘Vovochka’ joke:

It seems that here what we have is motion from a less exalted notion of life to a more exalted one, as also an expression of the superiority of those who have remembered the more exalted notion over the soul-less bureaucrats who believe living just is habitation. Thus:

Living as habitation !⇑ Living as thriving

The irrascible soul-∫ /the soulless bureaucrat.

Or how about this joke from the ancient Greek joke book that has come to be called the Philogelos [Laughter Lover]:

Barber: How would you like your hair cut? Customer: In silence!

Here what we have is a distinctly philosophical joke, one that trades on the plurivocity of that innocuous word ‘how’:

One meaning of ‘how’ !=> another meaning of ‘how’,

and also, of course, an amusing instance of a haughty fellow abusing someone of a lower social station:

customer-∫ /barber.

What, now, of Kant's joke? How is it to be analysed? With respect to superiority, it is clear enough: we have both the superiority of the worldly Englishman over the naive Indian, as well, it seems, as the superiority of the reader over Kant himself, in view of Kant’s miserable choice of jokes. But what about the incongruity? Is it simply this:

Foam expanding !⇓ Foam contracting ?

Is it, to speak in contemporary terms, that the Indian has grasped the thermodynamic character of the universe, and is picking out an apparent instance of its violation? If so, then might it not be the Indian who deserves to gloat in his superiority, and not the Englishman? I have no idea. I don’t understand the joke, and surely would have been left sitting stone-faced and awkward in the Königsberg parlor where it once had the local sage ROFL laughing. So the coordinator gave me the contact number for the Deacon who was in charge of Jail Ministry so I called him and arrived one Saturday at the jail where I met the two female Saint-Volunteers who had been going there for eons. It was the most medieval, scary, primitive, and ghoulish building in the universe — the old jail; the kind of building that is so incorrect that it shames animal abusers who run questionable puppy mills. For your information, I am hardly ever scared of anything having survived the burning Ghats of Benares; having survived hitchhiking in Spain with a female friend after the running of the bulls in Pamplona avoiding gang rape only by visibly fingering my Virgin Mary medallion that hung around my neck; having survived, at 21, finding a place to live after travelling alone on a train from Paris to Florence, sleeping on my pocketbook; having survived anorexia and shrinking from 145 to 80 pounds, growing feral hair and completely messing up my period forever; having survived Dystonia and the 4 times a year needles filled with Botox (rat poison?) injected into my trembling neck. I tell you these horror stories to prove to you that when I say the old jail was beyond the worst fetid spot in the Ganges where tortoises are known to eat half-cremated bodies, you know this jail was really bad and realy WRONG; it housed cells that were dark with centuries of women’s tears and menstrual blood, dark with DNA flying in the air ... Let me try to describe it to you. Not designed for privacy there was one big, barred and open room, housing about 12 women, with that many bunk beds and a small, open room to the side with a stinky toilet. I am so distressed remembering the room that I can’t remember if the bathroom had a door or not. Too freaked to be clear. I think it didn’t. The women seemed to be in serial, horror movie mode; seemingly mad, disheveled, noisy, demonically angry and shouting /talking over each other. Was their hair matted? I think yes. Which for some reason makes me think of Su Hui, who, in the fourth century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband consisting of a grid of 840 characters, not counting the central one, xin [which translates as ‘heart’]. No one has ever fully explored all of its possibilities, but it is estimated that the poem — and the poems within the poem — may be read as many as three thousand or twelve thousand ways. Su Hui herself said, “As it lingers aimlessly, twisting and turning, it takes on a pattern of its own. No one but my beloved can be sure of comprehending it.”

22.02.2017

Among the most iconic and unforgettable images of the Holocaust are photos of Jews being marched at gunpoint through the streets of Amsterdam, Paris and Warsaw, of grim-faced adults holding the hands of terrified children, on their way to the labor and death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen. Under the Nazi regime, these deportations were entirely legal. The Jews had not only been stripped of their citizenship but criminalized, portrayed as a cancer on society that had to be removed.

Just the other week, 680 people were deported from the United States, but one searches in vain for similar images. What we mostly see are pictures of a young man, alone, his head nearly shaved, photographed from the back, handcuffed and pressed up against the car waiting to take him away. These images support the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims that nearly all of the deportees are men who have been convicted of felony charges. Bad dudes.

But a very different story has begun to emerge – of women with children, of hard-working men – people who have committed some minor infraction, or none at all, and who have been ripped out of their lives and sent to countries they left as children. The case of Guadalupe García de Rayos, separated from her two American-born teenagers and deported from Arizona to Mexico for the crime of using a fake social security number so she could work – received considerable attention.

A widely circulated photo shows Ms de Rayos behind bars, apparently in an ICE van: an isolated person and presumably, an isolated case. We have been reading about Jeanette Vizguerra, a mother of four who has sought sanctuary in a Denver church, and of an undocumented transgender woman in El Paso, arrested after seeking court protection from domestic violence.

If one lives in a large city, and has any connection to the immigrant community, one hears many such stories. And it’s only going to get worse. New rules issued by the Trump administration on Tuesday aim to deport more people, more quickly – regardless of the families that will be torn apart as a result.

A woman I know, who lives in Queens, became alarmed when her boyfriend failed to show up for work recently. It was 24 hours before she heard from him; he had been picked up by ICE agents during a random stop on the street – a practice, essentially a form of racial profiling, that ICE denies – and sent to the border city of Reynosa. (In the past, deportees had been transported to the capital of the state from which they came, but now many are simply being dumped across the border.)

An undocumented friend – who has been here for decades, who has no criminal record and who has, along with her husband, worked tirelessly to support her family – was recently advised to draft a notarized letter specifying who she designated to raise her three daughters in the event that she and her husband didn’t return from work, after ICE raids.

Unlike Trump’s ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, which provided obvious and logical sites for protest – airport terminals nationwide – these arrests (secret, rapid, widespread) are more difficult for protesters to foresee and forestall. And many of the witnesses are themselves too frightened to protest, film, or otherwise document these seizures.

And so we are allowed and encouraged to go on believing that only “bad hombres” are being targeted. We are spared the images of the anguished mothers and fathers and their frightened children – of people very much like us. In fact, we are encouraged to believe that they are not like us.

Often, when one hears migrants defended, it’s because they make such a necessary contribution to our workforce, to our daily lives. But they are not merely workers who pick lettuce here, who wash the dishes in our restaurants, who clean the houses and mow the lawns of Americans. They are decent people who have come here not to sell drugs and join gangs, but to escape violence and poverty and to make better lives for their families. They are men and women who love their children, just as we do, who suffer the same sorrows and losses that we do, who cherish the same hopes and dreams.

There are numerous eyewitness accounts written by bystanders who witnessed the Nazi roundups of the Jews. Later, everyone would claim to have been sympathetic to the deportees, and all would insist that there was nothing they could do. They felt helpless, powerless; they were afraid.

It’s painful to think that we have become those bystanders. I, for one, refuse to believe that we are a nation of cruel and heartless people, lacking the basic sympathy, the courage and resourcefulness to protect the innocent and protest the violence and terror being visited – right here, right now – on our fellow human beings.

19.02.2017

Yet the Grundrisse alone provides ample evidence that the earlier theory of alienation and the later economic critique are part and parcel of the same program. These notebooks, written in 1857–8, well after Marx’s purported break with his early “humanistic” theory of alienation, contain numerous references to that self-same theory, discussing again the alienation of labor from its products and act of production, from the natural world, from self and others, from species life, but this time as the emergent result of the capitalist mode of production. Further, the essential link between the historically specific critique of that mode and the existential alienation that it produces is intended even in the early writings. The very first statement in the section on alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is quite clear in this regard. Which is to say that

All points of friction are in sapphire, that Stars ache, Crocodile or pig or scorpion. That’s why my self-driving car doesn’t stop, Making the plant grow with a mysterious green energy. That’s why I am I am no longer Waiting for evening To cave my head in with a baseball bat. Been there, etc. Night scene, a moth of oars. And now you’re the sea floor, with beautiful plumy gray/purple weeds. My question is really NOT about the reality of the real world. Red flames Are all that is. Cooda wooda shooda shit Tears on drumskins. Further tweaks to the model will yield. This just feels like it’s for Annette. Which is to say that When the apocalypse happens Someone somewhere at some point Is gonna have to drink bong water.

With all this in earshot, the second part of this paper will investigate music of extremely extended duration, specifically focusing on two examples: Jem Finer’s 1000-year composition Longplayer and John Cage’s Organ2 /As Slow as Possible, a work whose current performance is scheduled to last for 639 years. The development of spent nuclear fuel repositories such as that of Onkalo in Finland also requires careful planning at scales that dwarf the human lifespan. Think about it. Ultrasound is used to inspect welds, establish the uniformity and quality of poured concrete, and monitor metal fatigue. The sound is not threatening. Actually, it is quite soothing. There is little movement here, save sound waves cycling against each other. Over time a shift occurs and a throbbing tone pronounces itself, mimicking the machine pulses still faintly heard. We read that this hypnotic sound is an audio portrait of an old church now abandoned. The congregation must assemble elsewhere, for its place of worship rests in a zone of exclusion. AION features three other sites that lie within the compass of this zone: ‘Auditorium’, ‘Swimming Pool’, ‘Gymnasium’. Yet gravity is an extremely difficult fact: Kindellan’s sprung model swings backwards and forwards through the tragi-comic double-act and settles nowhere. Yet Kindellan’s pendulum isn’t out, but only stumbling after Crangle’s ‘song-o’; herded over tricksy ground, rising and falling. To do the best we can is to mouth our way through it. If the present half-page does not allow for comment of the serious kind this poetry asks, then it might allow for a number of points of co-ordination useful to further maps. (And did your mother never tell you not to speak with your mouth full? And did you, even so?!)

‘Sibilant, I ascend to any nest’

In any case, the last poem Tom sent Martin Corless-Smith (maybe his last poem?) “Previs”, film-makers’ jargon for previsualization, mocking up scenes in advance of the actual production. He had permission to bring it out as a chapbook, and maybe he will, but what the hell.

i was about to speak to me art was in its shopfront making artisanal empathy register today politicians kept happening upon events aberrant in real world

You could also call it geospatial intelligence gathering. It’s reading the landscape (a word you can take in any sense). I do take photographs — that is, I take other people’s photographs. I take photographs from the network. But they’re not really photographs. The wind is an agent who plays, and the music belongs to the spirits of ancestors. But if I want to give ‘full ontological weight’ to speculative cyclone imaginaries, to what they might be ... All day and night the wind played ancestor music. He heard the spirit waves being rolled in by the sea water creatures. The earth murmured, the underground serpent, living in the underground river that was kilometers wide, responded with hostile growls. The old man went on to laugh the more. Then he mentioned tee shirts. ‘This is living country!’ is what any Aboriginal person from around Broome will tell you if they are anti-gas or anti-fracking. Reminding us of a character in Cyclonopedia, Dr. Hamid Parsani, increasingly preoccupied with oil as the rotting corpse of the Sun, and as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives: Once oil reaches its destination, the crusading war machines, whose first disposition is to be dynamic, will fuel up and assemble themselves with the oil and its derivatives. As the machines of the western enlightenment consume oil either by burning the blob or fattening up on the blob, the smuggled war machines start to activate and are chemically unbound. The nervous system and the chemistry of war machines smuggled through oil infuse with the western machines feasting on oil unnoticed, as petroleum has already dissolved or refinedly emulsified them in itself, as its chemical elements or its essential derivatives. Which is why Alvanson’s holes, as it turns out, are pink. Pink magnolias, NYPL, NYBG, cherry blossoms in DC more pink ... a fleshed out nipple, a bleeding heart, little girls’ pink velvet ribbons, pink spaces, pink sweater set, Christos’ [sic] pink, pink blush, or the lack of need for blush cotton candy Pink poodles or pink cats pink cover of Laches the most perfect shade of pink lipstick pink cd holders pink pearl necklace pink pearl earrings pink camisole pink highlighter pink Christmas lights and pink flowers — peonies, tulips, Christmas Cactus in bloom in my room, pinkish lilac, pink hydrangea, pink rose of sharons, rare pink poppies, carpet roses, spinning in pink flowers ... begonia, spider flowers, cosmos, sweet peas, toad ax, moonwort, petunias, phlox!, butterfly flower, sun moss, wax pink lilies, caprifoliaceae, pink wisteria, malvaceae, oyster plant in pink, floxglove [sic], caryophyllaceae, heather, theaceae, magnolias, chinese crab apple ash by my eyes, Pink torrent. Oh, and speaking of bong water, apparently someone built a giant drug catapult on the Mexico-US border. However, the ultimate work to be produced along these lines is the three-way performance Black, the total colour-throne, one of several interlocking batteries from which a polyhedral assault is aimed at the martial functions. Within the same world, the token of love’s legalisation is extracted from a turd. Which references a recent popular media story, wherein a woman unwittingly swallowed her engagement ring, which had been deposited secretly into her ice cream by her boyfriend. It is within this world, which we inhabit, that corpses are forged to fill ‘duplicated pet graveyards’; it is a world thick with strategic ‘numismatics / and parapsychology’, where ‘removing and ironing skin’ is a naturalised phase of the hygienic order. It is within this world that this story of Nikola Tesla is told: ‘Tesla had many pigeons he fed and cared for, but one, he was particularly fond of. He described it as being a beautiful female bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings. One night [in 1922] the bird flew into Tesla’s room at Hotel St. Regis, and he perceived that she was attempting to tell him she was dying. Tesla said a light came from her eyes more intense than he had ever produced by the most powerful lamps. The bird then died and Tesla said that at that same moment, something went out of his life and he knew his work was finished.’ So I’m off to San Diego now, to buy a house. There’s something about sitting in your studio

in the middle of the Pacific Ocean geographically speaking further away from any other land mass than any other location on Planet Earth drinking 100% organic Kona coffee picked just last week by your almost friend but most certainly acquaintance Isaac and roasted only yesterday morning that makes you feel like you can do whatever you want with your life that the choices are yours to make and the object of your study if you think of this creative space you play in as an object can be the philosophical rendering of a theoretical premise on duration [the timelessness of moving–remixing] Drinking 100% just roasted yesterday Kona coffee while the rain is pouring out of the mountain and smashing into my picture window suggests Nature’s own avant-garde movement trying to bust in and destroy everything that came before it Meanwhile musing on the writings of Alfred North Whitehead somehow led me to the performance art of David Antin who I have also been reading lately not that we all want to make meaning out of objects but for those who do want to make meaning out of objects ‘ ... again and again like a koan and stay long enough for that which is a kind of duration’ Not that walking is bad for you actually it’s very good if you really want to get into it then I suggest you buy a fitbit or whatever if you go over 10,000 steps you’re staying in good shape literally you are sculpting your cardiovascular skeletal musculature into much better shape ...

Which is to tell you what you already know, that cyborg “sex” restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates. OK? It’s orange, after all. So she walked into a bar, held up her right arm and said, “Today is Gwendolyn Brooks’ birthday.” In another piece he used a darning egg, moving it lengthwise along the strings while trilling, as I recall, on the keyboard; this produced a glissando of harmonics. Then she spent a year hallucinating birds. Everyone else was also busy hallucinating their own animals. One man saw lizards everywhere he went, doing pushups in the sun. I can do it, she repeats. I can do anything. But the moose made the house feel crowded, polite as he tried to be. But now I’ve proven that my ovary has its own brain. OK?

oneitd, crine mend zin

oneitd, crine mend zin

spone mmence (mams numeral)

rews)ploof) emble blems

cact cact

rews)ploof)thmind) thmind)

Thus, the use of Whitehead’s metaphysical system for this fundamental project on Marx is neither gratuitous nor arbitrary; it is, I will show, the most adequate articulation of a metaphysical vision which provides the deep connection between the ontological and economic spheres. It will help to expose aspects of the critique hitherto suppressed, neglected, or misread, it will explicate and provide the solid foundations necessary to ground the ontological statements made by Marx throughout his writings, it will link these to the critique of political economy, and it will allow the critique to reach effectively into the present reality of capitalism and into the projective envisionment of a socialist future. Therefore, implicit in my work here will be a suggestion that process philosophy, if it is to remain honest to its own claims, is, or should be, economically, politically, and what amounts to the same thing, socially radical. Yet in the middle distance could be discerned what seemed a vast crater full to overflow, a mound of teeming specks heaving and twisting in the gloom. Breath, breath, breath, breath, breath. If only Winnicott had gone further with that aside about the baby’s first perception of breath, median between inner and outer, its role as the point at which the defences are down. In this case, the world is a train carriage on the Glasgow Subway, a closed circuit, as illustrated by the map which appears at the start of the poem. The registers are various; ‘a bit of Mahler’s Seventh’: ‘dah dum, da dum dah dee, / dah dah dah DAH da dah’. The ‘da’ obliquely signals the Father of the Church. The poem is dedicated to ‘sufferers of psychosomatic asthma’ (‘you know whoo / correction / you know whwo’). It was around this time that Stillwell began to consider the intense possibility that one of these dream witches had interfered with her own destiny on Earth. With serendipity out of the question, she asked the Mu elders for permission to approach the Nago’s temple. According to Stillwell, what transpired after her encounter with the Nago simply, wow: ‘As I looked down at my hands, they became translucent, and I saw, inscribed into impossible geometries on the dream cave’s wall beyond, an arrangement of ten circles, a number of smaller circles, and a series of interconnecting lines. This was my first encounter with what came to be called the Numogram.’ Stillwell’s faith in the unremitting diagrammatic exactness of the Numogram led her to think that it had the capacity to arise from any alphanumeric culture in history. She would excitedly tell me things like, ‘Here, the real city acts as a transmitter, the ice-dust, mist and most importantly, the Antarctic light, constitute interference to the transmitted signal,’ and

and ‘their genitals in plaster deck the halls like powerdrills.’ What is instead on offer in the vending orbit, here, the jargon of vocalized pathologies, is the special arrangement of product, but the product contains further elements of product, and further inside the seeds we pass through the hydrocarbon filaments of stuffed bunny cakes and the cancerous ions of batteryoperated dodecahedron calf implants (I mean your calf, not baby cows); its location is an expression of ideology; even as it dissolves and shows its synthetic muscle at the edges,

So no, “This is not a metaphor / a poem is just a good place to put your convictions.” One, for example, involves going to Emily Dickinson’s old house and rubbing dirt from her yard all over my body. It was just generally amazing. The most memorable line, maybe, was: “Jesus didn’t need balance / He had nails.” In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, then, we find that “Heidegger, a German musician in London, was fantastically deformed, but a clever and intelligent person with whom aristocrats liked to associate for the sake of conversation. Once it occurred to him at a drinking party to claim to a lord that he had the ugliest face in London. The lord reflected and then made a wager that he would present a face still more ugly. He then sent for a drunken woman, at whose appearance the whole party burst into laughter and shouted: “Heidegger, you have lost the wager!” “Not so fast,” he replied, “let the woman wear my wig and let me wear her headdress; then we shall see.” As this took place, everybody fell to laughing, to the point of suffocation, because the woman looked like a very presentable gentleman, and the fellow looked like a witch. This shows that in order to call anyone beautiful, or at least bearably pretty, one must not judge absolutely, but always only relatively. It also shows that no one ought to call a fellow ugly just because he is not handsome.” Although it seems simply to be a humorous detour that makes the disgusting enjoyable in Lessing’s sense, this anecdote teaches two things with dialectical rigor: first, a woman strikes us as uglier than an ugly man even when she is actually less ugly; second, a man can win the prize for ugliness only when he switches sexual signifiers and “look[s] like a witch.” The adjectives “beautiful” and “ugly” are therefore in a very precise sense to be applied only relatively: relative, namely, to sexual difference. To be legitimate, “ugly” always and continuously requires this quasi-transcendental reference to the disgusting “old woman” regardless of whether we are dealing with a “real” woman or a disguised man: this, we may say, is the lex Heidegger.

Aesthetics, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took

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Now I imitate Dickinson from memory

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Engels, the beautiful walrus (“On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon ...”)

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Beckett feeding ice-cream to a three-legged dog

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If you bring neoliberalism into this, I will shoot [illegible]. I will use the robot Bertolt Brecht to travel back in time

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“Stay-shun!”

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Implausible that the revolutionary bucolic should fall to me, the bearer of gratuitous hayfever

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So I drink municipal menthol. I grow more sad

Then he said, “After this Motel a separate part of the Zone of the Reduced Ones begins. A separate Sector, as you will see. You will still find some Reduced — or too Continent — Ones there, it is true, but in them the error has found an explanation and a consciousness: it is raised in some way to the dignity of religion, because, as it will be easy for you to understand, to give greatness to one part of reality it had to agree to sacrifice that of another ...” He got up, left the Motel behind him, set out for the highway, with its road markers, its center barrier, its sidewalks, its dividing lines, now solid now broken, painted white; its emergency stations; its elegant bridges over sordid, decrepit muddy canals ... gradually as we approached the border, with its barrier and police-like construction, the air grew darker and darker. Like a night that falls suddenly, with the quickness of a summer storm. Everything was swallowed up by the darkness, and it was done barely in time to see the sign-post: the usual I.W.I.P., followed this time by the inscription: ‘Autonomous Sector of the Reasoners: Irrational and Rational’. The rails of the barrier were lifted in the densest darkness, by the light of sinister batteries, the Demons enclosed in their fierce novices’ silence ... [The canto ends. What follows are 13 illustrated pages — including one of Gramsci’s grave marker — entitled “Faded Iconography (for a ‘Photographic poem’)”] In such myths, the gods are often doing what humans do. Enki brings order to the earth and arranges for its cultivation; he pours water into the beds of the Tigris and Euphrates, he stocks them with fish, setting up laws for the sea (the Persian Gulf) and the wind; he creates cereals, he opens “the holy furrows,”, he entrusts the plow and yoke to the god of canals and ditches, the pickax and the brickmold to Kabta, the god of bricks; he lays foundations of houses, stables, sheepfolds, fills the valley with animals. Which is why every two weeks a child in the US dies from furniture, appliances or TVs tipping over, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. With that in mind, listen to Stuart reading a footnote to the book, which begins “In the air above the abyss…” What’ll you hear? A voice, a silence, static, and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel dumpster, so yes,

this world we love and keep our love in keeps tearing our hands to shreds, while a magick eye plays tricks under the ongoing mossy cloud-mass, exhilarating triangles and timpani softly in silt air, in the blanketed nowhere of now, aka

Moloch’s “cloud” done up as a chase sequence involving a mysterious booming sound, a side-scrolling pig’s head, and a lucky number seven, and featuring an extended cameo by the brain structure primarily responsible for coordinating stress response in humans and other animals. Oh no! Oh no! My transmissions have been hacked. It is in this way, not sure what corpse or shade I sit in, that I walk the aisles ... I scout the worm ... my skin stretched as paper over the head, the grass false or real, virtual, organic, socially made, evolve, dissolve, revolve, go glitch; in the stifling courtyard enclosed, in the city a cell, with infinite free drinks, the packs of produce, a body in a bed, the weight of stone rocked to nuclear, collapsing into pollen, minute detail of the body gesture danced or forced, reeling, held distended. Inside, stones, clocks, fires, rivers, screaming pigs, the singing dead, ein guter mensch, a series of lines and pages in various potential or actual manifestations and angles. The sea, intelligence agencies, bodies, odes, elegies, comedy, tragedy, totality. All Christmas trees made of skulls. Speaking of Luciano Cilio’s Dialoghi Del Presente,

the ice has a pulp heart, or is it vice versa,
which is somewhere maybe embedded in the grey walls —
I rake em with my nails; scream and claw the swarming particles OUT

I’m murmuring again, rhyming like a fiend. Please,
they say, please: the doubleback blues.
Then she was driving the pickup backwards downhill.